For some years, the munitions art has sought to devise a projectile or missile of minimum lethality which will immediately incapacitate a human being, primarily for law-enforcement use. The more society and the law have stressed the need to keep the peace and protect the public with minimum necessary force, the more police officers have hesitated to shoot, often with result fatal to themselves.
Outside the law-enforcement field, as householders and shopkeepers have increasingly looked to personal firearms for protection against rising violent crime, gun accidents and impulse shootings have added to the national gunshot toll.
Since the only generally accepted reason for firing a deadly bullet at anyone is to deter him in the act of killing or hurting someone else, humane hesitance to fire has permitted violent suspects to escape. More felons have escaped when police officers could not fire because of the danger to bystanders, nearby or at a distance.
Police forces still need and want an incapacitating alternative to deadly gunfire. For in the bulk of the many proposed alternatives developed to date, law-enforcement users have noted drawbacks. Examples:
Gun-fired tranquillizer darts or projectiles, in practice, have lacked a drug or drugs quick enough in taking effect upon a human target. Aside from this drawback, one man's lethal dose of most such agents would fail to subdue another.
These darts also share other drawbacks, police equipment specialists observe, with various gun-fired projectiles developed in the search.
Most of these must be larger and longer than a regular bullet, which would require the user to carry a second, separate launcher gun, and to decide -- typically in split-seconds -- which to draw and use. Generally, these require reloading after every shot, have very limited accurate range, and/or are ineffective unless they strike the head, which is too small a target.
The most frequent law-enforcement objection to proposed alternatives to the conventional bullet is that they offer insufficient certain latitude between risk of serious injury and failure to incapacitate.
Finally, typical of most gun-fired low-lethality incapacitating projectiles proposed to date is a complexity of structure that invites malfunctions in "street use", police specialists feel. This complexity also entails relatively high cost of manufacture, which would price them out of the reach of the typically tightly-budgeted police department.